Vancouver Olympics one year later: A lasting legacy, or a temporary condition?

The Games changed us for the better, and then they were over. What remains from that experience?

Performers at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games held at B.C. Place in Vancouver February 12, 2010. OLY01-17

Photograph by: Larry Wong
, Postmedia Olympic Team

“Canada has taken a stand for sport. We have turned a corner, and we must never look back.”

VANCOUVER — With that closing summation last February, the president-elect of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Marcel Aubut, put the exclamation point on what may have been the most emphatic statement a collective of Canadians ever made around a single shared mission.

The 2010 Winter Olympics brought us together in ways, and on a scale, most never dreamed possible. From years of preparation and uncharacteristic ambition to unprecedented achievement, from giddy participation to boisterous celebration, from private citizen largesse to corporate investment and enthusiastic government buy-in, the Games changed us for the better.

And then, they were over.

One year later, what remains? Having turned that corner, do we still have a clear idea of where we want to go from here or have we already started to double back? Somewhere, amid a trainload of statistics, lie hints that may one day provide answers.

Are there numbers to suggest more children are enrolled in skiing, skating, snowboarding, than a year ago? Is physical education suddenly popular in schools? Are kids spending fewer hours in front of the TV, exercising more, eating less garbage? Are hospital visits down because the populace, inspired by those glowing athletes of ours, has suddenly got religion when it comes to physical fitness? For now, it can only be a feeling.

“I think it’s provided some impetus. Look at the [multi-platform national health initiative] that’s being run right now on CBC — Live Right Now. I think this is a result of the Games, and people becoming more concerned with health and well-being,” said J.D. Miller, one of the Montreal businessmen behind B2ten, a private consortium of altruistic donors who put together $3 million in no-strings-attached funding to supplement the training needs of 24 elite athletes in the years leading up to the Vancouver Olympics.

B2ten beneficiaries won or shared in seven of Canada’s 14 gold medals, 12 of 26 overall.

“The legacy that struck me,” Miller said, “was the power and the passion of a country that’s [always] fully and completely embraced hockey, and has now spread across the full landscape.”

But is that a lasting legacy, or was it merely a temporary condition? At UBC, a whole spate of expert opinions from several faculties are being offered on the one-year anniversary of the Olympics, but one that catches the eye is from David Anderson of the faculty of education.

“How have citizens of the city changed one year later? There is a very strange sense of it being back to the pre-Games status quo,” he said. “I suspect what was unleashed in terms of our heightened willingness to engage with our fellow citizens, in the ways we did a year ago, is not gone. We just need an excuse to reignite it.”

It speaks to almost every aspect of the Games. Public engagement, corporate involvement, athletic commitment — all may need to be rekindled.

Are we paying more attention now to the World Cup results of the sliders, the cross-country and freestyle skiers, snowboarders and skaters than we were, say, two years ago, before we started to learn the names of our medal hopes? Or have we gone back to the pre-Games status quo, prepared to re-learn a new set of names three years from now, and try to remember them for two weeks for the Sochi Games in 2014?

What we do know is that most of the non-corporate funding levels for elite athletes have remained more or less static, which is about as good as we could hope for.

A lot of Own The Podium-related partnerships ended with the 2010 Games and “replacement funds” had to come from the federal government. The feds, in what ranks as a pleasant surprise, stepped up. So OTP lives. And not only lives, but is in the hands of some very smart, capable people, including CEO Alex Baumann, winter sports director Ken Read and Vanoc boss John Furlong, who heads an advisory board that includes OTP visionary and Games veteran Cathy Priestner-Allinger.

For its part, says Miller, B2ten has stayed committed, even significantly increased its contribution to a total of $20 million for the six-year period that encompasses the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympics in London and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, and the Winter Games in Sochi.

But corporate sponsorship for many of the national sports organizations (NSOs), even those that produced the best performances in Vancouver, “is falling off a cliff,” Miller said, “and you need funding to continue programs.”

Surely, that was to be expected. A home-country Olympics may be an irresistible opportunity for a company looking to get maximum bang for its buck, but the year after, and the year after that … not so much.

“A lot of our contracts have run out, or most of them run out at the end of this [season],” said Max Gartner, president of Alpine Canada, adding that many of the other NSOs are encountering similar challenges. “When you sign those long-term contracts, they always go through the Olympic cycle, and we tried to make them beyond Vancouver.

“So we are in a phase right now where … I think there’s going to be quite a bit of turnover. I don’t want to give you any names, but we’ve gotten notice that some of the sponsors that have been with us are not renewing, so it’s my job now to find us some new partners.

“And yeah, it is always more difficult, because people like to be involved when it’s a home Olympics, and now we’re in this little valley where the next Olympics is a long way out, and the challenge we have is, with high performance sport, you can’t start and stop. It takes a long time to get an athlete ready to challenge for a podium result.”

Gartner has been around long enough to remember what happened after the Calgary Olympics, when funding fell off sharply “and our results lingered around for a little bit, but eventually, they went downhill to the tune that between 1994 and 2007 we didn’t win a men’s downhill race.

“That’s 13 years, so I think it’s critical that we keep the funding at a certain level so that we don’t go through one of those huge holes.”

A post-Olympic year, competitively, is also a grab-bag of mixed priorities. A great many Canadian athletes who might otherwise have retired if it hadn’t been a home Olympics instead stayed active to take their shot in Vancouver. So there’s some changing of the guard going on, some athletes taking a one-year hiatus, some sports hit hard by weaker fields than in the buildup to the Olympics.

Expectations remain higher than ever in Canada — winning a record 14 golds will do that — but it remains to be seen whether the major elements that created the opportunity to reach so high are still there, or whether the fire has gone out.

“We’re gratified that we took the time to do what we did,” said Miller. “It was one piece of the puzzle that led to this country coming together and, for a brief period of time, feeling very much as one community as opposed to a series of communities strung across thousands of kilometres.

“But one year out, to try to measure legacy? I think you’ve got to look 10 years out. Look at Australia in 2010, 10 years after [Sydney] hosted the Games. Then you can say yeah, there’s real legacy. So I think the jury’s still out on that.”

Performers at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games held at B.C. Place in Vancouver February 12, 2010. OLY01-17

Photograph by: Larry Wong, Postmedia Olympic Team

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